Astronomers Discover a “Twin” Planet to The Mysterious, Long-Predicted Planet Nine

• See also:
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  Source: https://bigthink.com/surprising-scien…
  Source: https://www.salon.com/2020/12/13/astr…
  Source: https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/11/world/…
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• Astronomers Discover a “Twin” Planet to The Mysterious, Long-Predicted Planet Nine
  by NICOLE KARLIS, https://www.salon.com/
  An exotic planet far from its parent star has all the same properties that we hypothesize for Planet Nine
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  Of all the planets that humans have discovered in other solar systems, most of them orbit close and tight to their parent star. That’s partially due to the selection effect: the easiest-to-spot exoplanets (meaning a planet outside of our solar system) are those that are close enough to their star (or stars).
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  Hence, finding a planet that orbits really, really far from its parent star is a rare occurrence — so rare, in fact, that it’s hard to do even in our own solar system. Indeed, there is much evidence that points to the existence of a massive planet far beyond Pluto’s orbit, the theoretical Planet Nine; the problem is that it’s been nigh-impossible to find.
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  This week, the discovery of a massive exoplanet 336 light-years away, one that’s 11 times the mass of Jupiter, is renewing interest in finding Planet Nine and could hold some clues to its discovery. That’s because the existence of this exoplanet, named HD106906 b, proves that the positioning of distant, massive planets in a solar system is not just possible, but provides hints as to how it might happen.
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  In a paper published this week, astronomers examined years of data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope on an exoplanet called HD106906 b. Astronomers first discovered the exoplanet in 2013 with the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. At the time, astronomers didn’t know about the planet’s orbit or its size.
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  According to the new paper, the exoplanet orbits its host stars (yes, that’s plural — it’s a binary star system) once every 15,000 human years. Hence, it also sits extremely far away from its host twin stars, 730 times the distance between the Earth and the sun. That’s about 18 times further than Pluto is from our sun. 
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